On Liberty ebook

Discussed and debated from time immemorial, the concept of personal liberty went without codification until the 1859 publication of On Liberty. John Stuart Mill's complete and resolute dedication to the cause of freedom inspired this treatise, an enduring work through which the concept remains well known and studied.The British economist, philosopher, and ethical theorist's argument does not focus on "the so-called Liberty of the Will…but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual." Mill asks and answers provocative questions relating to the boundaries of social authority and individual sovereignty. In powerful and persuasive prose, he declares that there is "one very simple principle" regarding the use of coercion in society — one may only coerce others either to defend oneself or to defend others from harm.

Table of
Contents

CHAPTER IV. OF THE
LIMITS TO THE AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL.

FOOTNOTE

CHAPTER V.
APPLICATIONS.

To the beloved and deplored memory of her
who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best
in my writings—the friend and wife whose exalted sense of
truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation
was my chief reward—I dedicate this volume. Like all that I
have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me;
but the work as it stands has had, in a very insufficient degree,
the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most
important portions having been reserved for a more careful
re-examination, which they are now never destined to receive. Were
I but capable of interpreting to the world one-half the great
thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should
be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to
arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by
her all but unrivalled wisdom.

INTRODUCTION.

I.

John Stuart Mill was born on 20th May 1806. He
was a delicate child, and the extraordinary education designed by
his father was not calculated to develop and improve his physical
powers. "I never was a boy," he says; "never played cricket." His
exercise was taken in the form of walks with his father, during
which the elder Mill lectured his son and examined him on his work.
It is idle to speculate on the possible results of a different
treatment. Mill remained delicate throughout his life, but was
endowed with that intense mental energy which is so often combined
with physical weakness. His youth was sacrificed to an idea; he was
designed by his father to carry on his work; the individuality of
the boy was unimportant. A visit to the south of France at the age
of fourteen, in company with the family of General Sir Samuel
Bentham, was not without its influence. It was a glimpse of another
atmosphere, though the studious habits of his home life were
maintained. Moreover, he derived from it his interest in foreign
politics, which remained one of his characteristics to the end of
his life. In 1823 he was appointed junior clerk in the Examiners'
Office at the India House.

Mill's first essays were written in the
Traveller about a year before he entered the India House.
From that time forward his literary work was uninterrupted save by
attacks of illness. His industry was stupendous. He wrote articles
on an infinite variety of subjects, political, metaphysical,
philosophic, religious, poetical. He discovered Tennyson for his
generation, he influenced the writing of Carlyle's French
Revolution as well as its success. And all the while he was
engaged in studying and preparing for his more ambitious works,
while he rose step by step at the India Office. His Essays on
Unsettled Questions in Political Economy were written in 1831,
although they did not appear until thirteen years later. His
System of Logic, the design of which was even then
fashioning itself in his brain, took thirteen years to complete,
and was actually published before the Political Economy.
In 1844 appeared the article on Michelet, which its author
anticipated would cause some discussion, but which did not create
the sensation he expected. Next year there were the "Claims of
Labour" and "Guizot," and in 1847 his articles on Irish affairs in
the Morning Chronicle. These years were very much
influenced by his friendship and correspondence with Comte, a
curious comradeship between men of such different temperament. In
1848 Mill published his Political Economy, to which he had
given his serious study since the completion of his Logic.
His articles and reviews, though they involved a good deal of
work—as, for instance, the re-perusal of the Iliad
and the Odyssey in the original before reviewing Grote's
Greece—were recreation to the student. The year 1856
saw him head of the Examiners' Office in the India House, and
another two years brought the end of his official work, owing to
the transfer of India to the Crown. In the same year his wife died.
Liberty was published shortly after, as well as the
Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, and no year passed
without Mill making important contributions on the political,
philosophical, and ethical questions of the
day.

Seven years after the death of his wife, Mill
was invited to contest Westminster. His feeling on the conduct of
elections made him refuse to take any personal action in the
matter, and he gave the frankest expression to his political views,
but nevertheless he was elected by a large majority. He was not a
conventional success in the House; as a speaker he lacked
magnetism. But his influence was widely felt. "For the sake of the
House of Commons at large," said Mr. Gladstone, "I rejoiced in his
advent and deplored his disappearance. He did us all good." After
only three years in Parliament, he was defeated at the next General
Election by Mr. W. H. Smith. He retired to Avignon, to the pleasant
little house where the happiest years of his life had been spent in
the companionship of his wife, and continued his disinterested
labours. He completed his edition of his father's Analysis of
the Mind, and also produced, in addition to less important
work, The Subjection of Women, in which he had the active
co-operation of his step-daughter. A book on Socialism was under
consideration, but, like an earlier study of Sociology, it never
was written. He died in 1873, his last years being spent peacefully
in the pleasant society of his step-daughter, from whose tender
care and earnest intellectual sympathy he caught maybe a far-off
reflection of the light which had irradiated his spiritual
life.

II.

The
circumstances under which John Stuart Mill wrote his
Liberty are largely connected with the influence which
Mrs. Taylor wielded over his career. The dedication is well known.
It contains the most extraordinary panegyric on a woman that any
philosopher has ever penned. "Were I but capable of interpreting to
the world one-half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are
buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to
it than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write,
unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom." It is
easy for the ordinary worldly cynicism to curl a sceptical lip over
sentences like these. There may be exaggeration of sentiment, the
necessary and inevitable reaction of a man who was trained
according to the "dry light" of so unimpressionable a man as James
Mill, the father; but the passage quoted is not the only one in
which John Stuart Mill proclaims his unhesitating belief in the
intellectual influence of his wife. The treatise on
Liberty was written especially under her authority and
encouragement, but there are many earlier references to the power
which she exercised over his mind. Mill was introduced to her as
early as 1831, at a dinner-party at Mr. Taylor's house, where were
present, amongst others, Roebuck, W. J. Fox, and Miss Harriet
Martineau. The acquaintance rapidly ripened into intimacy and the
intimacy into friendship, and Mill was never weary of expatiating
on all the advantages of so singular a relationship. In some of the
presentation copies of his work on Political Economy, he
wrote the following dedication:—"To Mrs. John Taylor, who, of
all persons known to the author, is the most highly qualified
either to originate or to appreciate speculation on social
advancement, this work is with the highest respect and esteem
dedicated." An article on the enfranchisement of women was made the
occasion for another encomium. We shall hardly be wrong in
attributing a much later book, The Subjection of Women,
published in 1869, to the influence wielded by Mrs. Taylor.
Finally, the pages of the Autobiography ring with the
dithyrambic praise of his "almost infallible
counsellor."

The
facts of this remarkable intimacy can easily be stated. The
deductions are more difficult. There is no question that Mill's
infatuation was the cause of considerable trouble to his
acquaintances and friends. His father openly taxed him with being
in love with another man's wife. Roebuck, Mrs. Grote, Mrs. Austin,
Miss Harriet Martineau were amongst those who suffered because they
made some allusion to a forbidden subject. Mrs. Taylor lived with
her daughter in a lodging in the country; but in 1851 her husband
died, and then Mill made her his wife. Opinions were widely
divergent as to her merits; but every one agreed that up to the
time of her death, in 1858, Mill was wholly lost to his friends.
George Mill, one of Mill's younger brothers, gave it as his opinion
that she was a clever and remarkable woman, but "nothing like what
John took her to be." Carlyle, in his reminiscences, described her
with ambiguous epithets. She was "vivid," "iridescent," "pale and
passionate and sad-looking, a living-romance heroine of the
royalist volition and questionable destiny." It is not possible to
make much of a judgment like this, but we get on more certain
ground when we discover that Mrs. Carlyle said on one occasion that
"she is thought to be dangerous," and that Carlyle added that she
was worse than dangerous, she was patronising. The occasion when
Mill and his wife were brought into close contact with the Carlyles
is well known. The manuscript of the first volume of the French
Revolution had been lent to Mill, and was accidentally burnt
by Mrs. Mill's servant. Mill and his wife drove up to Carlyle's
door, the wife speechless, the husband so full of conversation that
he detained Carlyle with desperate attempts at loquacity for two
hours. But Dr. Garnett tells us, in his Life of Carlyle,
that Mill made a substantial reparation for the calamity for which
he was responsible by inducing the aggrieved author to accept half
of the £200 which he offered. Mrs. Mill, as I have said, died
in 1858, after seven years of happy companionship with her husband,
and was buried at Avignon. The inscription which Mill wrote for her
grave is too characteristic to be omitted:—"Her great and
loving heart, her noble soul, her clear, powerful, original, and
comprehensive intellect, made her the guide and support, the
instructor in wisdom and the example in goodness, as she was the
sole earthly delight of those who had the happiness to belong to
her. As earnest for all public good as she was generous and devoted
to all who surrounded her, her influence has been felt in many of
the greatest improvements of the age, and will be in those still to
come. Were there even a few hearts and intellects like hers, this
earth would already become the hoped-for Heaven." These lines prove
the intensity of Mill's feeling, which is not afraid of abundant
verbiage; but they also prove that he could not imagine what the
effect would be on others, and, as Grote said, only Mill's
reputation could survive these and similar
displays.

Every one will judge for himself of this
romantic episode in Mill's career, according to such experience as
he may possess of the philosophic mind and of the value of these
curious but not infrequent relationships. It may have been a piece
of infatuation, or, if we prefer to say so, it may have been the
most gracious and the most human page in Mill's career. Mrs. Mill
may have flattered her husband's vanity by echoing his opinions, or
she may have indeed been an Egeria, full of inspiration and
intellectual helpfulness. What usually happens in these
cases,—although the philosopher himself, through his belief
in the equality of the sexes, was debarred from thinking
so,—is the extremely valuable action and reaction of two
different classes and orders of mind. To any one whose thoughts
have been occupied with the sphere of abstract speculation, the
lively and vivid presentment of concrete fact comes as a delightful
and agreeable shock. The instinct of the woman often enables her
not only to apprehend but to illustrate a truth for which she would
be totally unable to give the adequate philosophic reasoning. On
the other hand, the man, with the more careful logical methods and
the slow processes of formal reasoning, is apt to suppose that the
happy intuition which leaps to the conclusion is really based on
the intellectual processes of which he is conscious in his own
case. Thus both parties to the happy contract are equally pleased.
The abstract truth gets the concrete illustration; the concrete
illustration finds its proper foundation in a series of abstract
inquiries. Perhaps Carlyle's epithets of "iridescent" and "vivid"
refer incidentally to Mrs. Mill's quick perceptiveness, and thus
throw a useful light on the mutual advantages of the common work of
husband and wife. But it savours almost of impertinence even to
attempt to lift the veil on a mystery like this. It is enough to
say, perhaps, that however much we may deplore the exaggeration of
Mill's references to his wife, we recognise that, for whatever
reason, the pair lived an ideally happy
life.

It
still, however, remains to estimate the extent to which Mrs.
Taylor, both before and after her marriage with Mill, made actual
contributions to his thoughts and his public work. Here I may be
perhaps permitted to avail myself of what I have already written in
a previous work.[1] Mill gives
us abundant help in this matter in the Autobiography. When
first he knew her, his thoughts were turning to the subject of
Logic. But his published work on the subject owed nothing to her,
he tells us, in its doctrines. It was Mill's custom to write the
whole of a book so as to get his general scheme complete, and then
laboriously to re-write it in order to perfect the phrases and the
composition. Doubtless Mrs. Taylor was of considerable help to him
as a critic of style. But to be a critic of doctrine she was hardly
qualified. Mill has made some clear admissions on this point. "The
only actual revolution which has ever taken place in my modes of
thinking was already complete,"[2] he says,
before her influence became paramount. There is a curiously humble
estimate of his own powers (to which Dr. Bain has called
attention), which reads at first sight as if it contradicted this.
"During the greater part of my literary life I have performed the
office in relation to her, which, from a rather early period, I had
considered as the most useful part that I was qualified to take in
the domain of thought, that of an interpreter of original thinkers,
and mediator between them and the public." So far it would seem
that Mill had sat at the feet of his oracle; but observe the highly
remarkable exception which is made in the following
sentence:—"For I had always a humble opinion of my own powers
as an original thinker, except in abstract science (logic,
metaphysics, and the theoretic principles of political economy and
politics.)"[3] If Mill then
was an original thinker in logic, metaphysics, and the science of
economy and politics, it is clear that he had not learnt these from
her lips. And to most men logic and metaphysics may be safely taken
as forming a domain in which originality of thought, if it can be
honestly professed, is a sufficient title of
distinction.

Mrs. Taylor's assistance in the Political
Economy is confined to certain definite points. The purely
scientific part was, we are assured, not learnt from her. "But it
was chiefly her influence which gave to the book that general tone
by which it is distinguished from all previous expositions of
political economy that had any pretensions to be scientific, and
which has made it so useful in conciliating minds which those
previous expositions had repelled. This tone consisted chiefly in
making the proper distinction between the laws of the production of
wealth, which are real laws of Nature, dependent on the properties
of objects, and the modes of its distribution, which, subject to
certain conditions, depend on human will.... I had indeed
partially learnt this view of things from the thoughts awakened in
me by the speculations of St. Simonians; but it was made a
living principle, pervading and animating the book, by my wife's
promptings."[4] The part
which is italicised is noticeable. Here, as elsewhere, Mill thinks
out the matter by himself; the concrete form of the thoughts is
suggested or prompted by the wife. Apart from this "general tone,"
Mill tells us that there was a specific contribution. "The chapter
which has had a greater influence on opinion than all the rest,
that on the Probable Future of the Labouring Classes, is entirely
due to her. In the first draft of the book that chapter did not
exist. She pointed out the need of such a chapter, and the extreme
imperfection of the book without it; she was the cause of my
writing it." From this it would appear that she gave Mill that
tendency to Socialism which, while it lends a progressive spirit to
his speculations on politics, at the same time does not manifestly
accord with his earlier advocacy of peasant proprietorships. Nor,
again, is it, on the face of it, consistent with those doctrines of
individual liberty which, aided by the intellectual companionship
of his wife, he propounded in a later work. The ideal of individual
freedom is not the ideal of Socialism, just as that invocation of
governmental aid to which the Socialist resorts is not consistent
with the theory of laisser-faire. Yet Liberty was
planned by Mill and his wife in concert. Perhaps a slight
visionariness of speculation was no less the attribute of Mrs. Mill
than an absence of rigid logical principles. Be this as it may, she
undoubtedly checked the half-recognised leanings of her husband in
the direction of Coleridge and Carlyle. Whether this was an
instance of her steadying influence,[5] or whether
it added one more unassimilated element to Mill's diverse
intellectual sustenance, may be wisely left an open question. We
cannot, however, be wrong in attributing to her the parentage of
one book of Mill, The Subjection of Women. It is true that
Mill had before learnt that men and women ought to be equal in
legal, political, social, and domestic relations. This was a point
on which he had already fallen foul of his father's essay on
Government. But Mrs. Taylor had actually written on this
very point, and the warmth and fervour of Mill's denunciations of
women's servitude were unmistakably caught from his wife's view of
the practical disabilities entailed by the feminine
position.

III.

Liberty was published in 1859, when
the nineteenth century was half over, but in its general spirit and
in some of its special tendencies the little tract belongs rather
to the standpoint of the eighteenth century than to that which saw
its birth. In many of his speculations John Stuart Mill forms a
sort of connecting link between the doctrines of the earlier
English empirical school and those which we associate with the name
of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In his Logic, for instance, he
represents an advance on the theories of Hume, and yet does not see
how profoundly the victories of Science modify the conclusions of
the earlier thinker. Similarly, in his Political Economy,
he desires to improve and to enlarge upon Ricardo, and yet does not
advance so far as the modifications of political economy by
Sociology, indicated by some later—and especially
German—speculations on the subject. In the tract on
Liberty, Mill is advocating the rights of the individual
as against Society at the very opening of an era that was rapidly
coming to the conclusion that the individual had no absolute rights
against Society. The eighteenth century view is that individuals
existed first, each with their own special claims and
responsibilities; that they deliberately formed a Social State,
either by a contract or otherwise; and that then finally they
limited their own action out of regard for the interests of the
social organism thus arbitrarily produced. This is hardly the view
of the nineteenth century. It is possible that logically the
individual is prior to the State; historically and in the order of
Nature, the State is prior to the individual. In other words, such
rights as every single personality possesses in a modern world do
not belong to him by an original ordinance of Nature, but are
slowly acquired in the growth and development of the social state.
It is not the truth that individual liberties were forfeited by
some deliberate act when men made themselves into a Commonwealth.
It is more true to say, as Aristotle said long ago, that man is
naturally a political animal, that he lived under strict social
laws as a mere item, almost a nonentity, as compared with the
Order, Society, or Community to which he belonged, and that such
privileges as he subsequently acquired have been obtained in virtue
of his growing importance as a member of a growing organisation.
But if this is even approximately true, it seriously restricts that
liberty of the individual for which Mill pleads. The individual has
no chance, because he has no rights, against the social organism.
Society can punish him for acts or even opinions which are
anti-social in character. His virtue lies in recognising the
intimate communion with his fellows. His sphere of activity is
bounded by the common interest. Just as it is an absurd and
exploded theory that all men are originally equal, so it is an
ancient and false doctrine to protest that a man has an individual
liberty to live and think as he chooses in any spirit of antagonism
to that larger body of which he forms an insignificant
part.

Nowadays this view of Society and of its
development, which we largely owe to the Philosophie
Positive of M. Auguste Comte, is so familiar and possibly so
damaging to the individual initiative, that it becomes necessary to
advance and proclaim the truth which resides in an opposite theory.
All progress, as we are aware, depends on the joint process of
integration and differentiation; synthesis, analysis, and then a
larger synthesis seem to form the law of development. If it ever
comes to pass that Society is tyrannical in its restrictions of the
individual, if, as for instance in some forms of Socialism, based
on deceptive analogies of Nature's dealings, the type is everything
and the individual nothing, it must be confidently urged in answer
that the fuller life of the future depends on the manifold
activities, even though they may be antagonistic, of the
individual. In England, at all events, we know that government in
all its different forms, whether as King, or as a caste of nobles,
or as an oligarchical plutocracy, or even as trades unions, is so
dwarfing in its action that, for the sake of the future, the
individual must revolt. Just as our former point of view limited
the value of Mill's treatise on Liberty, so these
considerations tend to show its eternal importance. The omnipotence
of Society means a dead level of uniformity. The claim of the
individual to be heard, to say what he likes, to do what he likes,
to live as he likes, is absolutely necessary, not only for the
variety of elements without which life is poor, but also for the
hope of a future age. So long as individual initiative and effort
are recognised as a vital element in English history, so long will
Mill's Liberty, which he confesses was based on a
suggestion derived from Von Humboldt, remain as an indispensable
contribution to the speculations, and also to the health and
sanity, of the world.

What his wife really was to Mill, we shall,
perhaps, never know. But that she was an actual and vivid force,
which roused the latent enthusiasm of his nature, we have abundant
evidence. And when she died at Avignon, though his friends may have
regained an almost estranged companionship, Mill was, personally,
the poorer. Into the sorrow of that bereavement we cannot enter: we
have no right or power to draw the veil. It is enough to quote the
simple words, so eloquent of an unspoken grief—"I can say
nothing which could describe, even in the faintest manner, what
that loss was and is. But because I know that she would have wished
it, I endeavour to make the best of what life I have left, and to
work for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be
derived from thoughts of her, and communion with her
memory."

W.
L. COURTNEY.

London, July 5th,
1901.

FOOTNOTES:

[1]Life of John
Stuart Mill, chapter vi. (Walter
Scott.)

[2]Autobiography, p. 190.

[3]Ibid., p.
242.

[4]Autobiography, pp. 246, 247.

[5] Cf. an instructive
page in the Autobiography, p.
252.

CHAPTER
I.

INTRODUCTORY.

The
subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so
unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical
Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of
the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the
individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in
general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical
controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon
to make itself recognised as the vital question of the future. It
is so far from being new, that in a certain sense, it has divided
mankind, almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage of
progress into which the more civilised portions of the species have
now entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and requires
a different and more fundamental
treatment.

The
struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous
feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest
familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England. But in
old times this contest was between subjects, or some classes of
subjects, and the government. By liberty, was meant protection
against the tyranny of the political rulers. The rulers were
conceived (except in some of the popular governments of Greece) as
in a necessarily antagonistic position to the people whom they
ruled. They consisted of a governing One, or a governing tribe or
caste, who derived their authority from inheritance or conquest,
who, at all events, did not hold it at the pleasure of the
governed, and whose supremacy men did not venture, perhaps did not
desire, to contest, whatever precautions might be taken against its
oppressive exercise. Their power was regarded as necessary, but
also as highly dangerous; as a weapon which they would attempt to
use against their subjects, no less than against external enemies.
To prevent the weaker members of the community from being preyed
upon by innumerable vultures, it was needful that there should be
an animal of prey stronger than the rest, commissioned to keep them
down. But as the king of the vultures would be no less bent upon
preying on the flock than any of the minor harpies, it was
indispensable to be in a perpetual attitude of defence against his
beak and claws. The aim, therefore, of patriots, was to set limits
to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over
the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.
It was attempted in two ways. First, by obtaining a recognition of
certain immunities, called political liberties or rights, which it
was to be regarded as a breach of duty in the ruler to infringe,
and which if he did infringe, specific resistance, or general
rebellion, was held to be justifiable. A second, and generally a
later expedient, was the establishment of constitutional checks; by
which the consent of the community, or of a body of some sort,
supposed to represent its interests, was made a necessary condition
to some of the more important acts of the governing power. To the
first of these modes of limitation, the ruling power, in most
European countries, was compelled, more or less, to submit. It was
not so with the second; and to attain this, or when already in some
degree possessed, to attain it more completely, became everywhere
the principal object of the lovers of liberty. And so long as
mankind were content to combat one enemy by another, and to be
ruled by a master, on condition of being guaranteed more or less
efficaciously against his tyranny, they did not carry their
aspirations beyond this point.

A
time, however, came, in the progress of human affairs, when men
ceased to think it a necessity of nature that their governors
should be an independent power, opposed in interest to themselves.
It appeared to them much better that the various magistrates of the
State should be their tenants or delegates, revocable at their
pleasure. In that way alone, it seemed, could they have complete
security that the powers of government would never be abused to
their disadvantage. By degrees, this new demand for elective and
temporary rulers became the prominent object of the exertions of
the popular party, wherever any such party existed; and superseded,
to a considerable extent, the previous efforts to limit the power
of rulers. As the struggle proceeded for making the ruling power
emanate from the periodical choice of the ruled, some persons began
to think that too much importance had been attached to the
limitation of the power itself. That